2015-12-31

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Discussion (50) ¬

Well, this kills off the theory that the Revenant is Zero, since the one piloting the plane sounds more like the Revenant.
The pilot could still be Tyler, but in that case the final panel wouldn’t fit since Revenant wouldn’t need Tyler’s approval on theatrics and he pretty much wrote the book on dramatic acting.

Either the Revenant has multiple jets or the jet wasn’t too badly damaged by the crash in the previous day.

Julie won’t trust trust Forak to not mess things up up on his own. But she knows he can be trusted to stay generally loyal and not mess up following clear instructions – it’s the only thing he does well other than a spaceship engineer’s job… which probably was mostly “RTFM and heed your captain” too.

If someone competent and confident like Revenant is coaching Forak (or speaks through him), he can do his part without aimlessly wandering around.
Also, the idea to give him somewhat bigger pants to grow into was already here – it didn’t work because the costume of Atlas is so obviously not in his size that no one actually expected him to fill it, but Zero doesn’t come with ready set of benchmarks.

SIdenote. Isn’t it a bad idea to have the flying entrance in the middle of the street? I know there’s a tradition of secrecy and theatrics among heros, and a manhole is a ready made excuse for there to be a hole in the ground.. But I can see so much going wrong with that. Like getting hit by a car… and thus totalling the car and killing the driver.

Wouldn’t be hard to set up the doorway with a proximity sensor, or the like, that warns any would-be exiters that it’s not safe to leave due to traffic. Heck, given the universe, you could probably set up surreptitious cameras and tie it into a computer that can be more picky about go/no go signals.

I think the school actually has a sewer access route (not sure but MAYBE Ron was using it during his ‘afraid of flying high’ period), so it’s not unlikely that Zero just flew up and out to the sewers and down them to the pre-selected manhole exit in a rarely accessed location.

Again, it isn’t the positioning or plausibility of a manhole entrance, but the safety concerns, for those exiting, and the traffic involved. And besides, that brings up another impracticality of the entrance.. Even if you take control of the traffic signals to try and control the flow of traffic, rush hours are still a concern. Especially since the entrance will be most used during rush hour, when school lets out and the kids fly home.

Besides, a whole host of super-kids bursting out of a manhole is kinda obvious. Almost as obnoxious as a school crossing guard herding dozens of kids through a crosswalk!

Nah, the whole thing is just implausible and risky, IMHO. I can only see it being useful if it’s infrequently used, perhaps by single adults coming and going at odd hours.

So it is the Revenant, he is the shadow head, while the person in the costume is either unaffiliated, or otherwised hired FISS (who may or may not be any of the listed possibilities). Honestly, it’s incredibly ironic that the only person who would immediately foot the resources and outline for such a project on the behalf of two gradeschoolers (two very mature and intelligent for their age, but still gradeschoolers), would never be accepted as the actual leader of the group because he’s not a FISS, and also not a powered hero. Which is also hypocritical considering that he’s more discriminated against in the superhero community as non-powered instead of common powered (it seems to me as well, he’s also the ONLY non-powered, is it just me, or does the Revenant just like taking chances with people because he might be lonely). But you know humans.

No, I just mean humans. Metahumans would suggest that them having powers effects this behavior, but it doesn’t. They aren’t being the more advanced beings or next step that would suggest they’re different, they’re acting like every other group which has chosen to distinguish itself. At the beginning at least, the suggestion of accepting all in the last few pages after the initial influx prioritizing FISS is a fantastic step to the right direction to accepting nonpowered heroes should they choose to be so of course, but I can’t help but think it may cause a sense of elitism within the group as the originals if it’s not kept in check (mind you, considering a number of things, mostly that both Julie and the Revenant will have a huge impact on the group mentality, that’s not as much of an issue as it could be).

Excellent point about Forak not being shown despite being usually omnipresent with a camera. But . . . were we really the only ones to not notice? I wonder if (Vetinari level 4) Ajax was paying attention. And if Forak contines to be absent when Zero is present, someone else might start putting things together. On the other hand, no-one seems to have put together that Tyler is Moon Shadow, so maybe universal obliviousness is the rule.

Here’s an amusing parallel: Forak is a nerdy bumbling journalist-like figure as Clark Kent was sometimes portrayed; Zero is a confident Superman-like persona.

Still, I think we should keep open the possibility that Forak not being in the pages we’ve seen might be a red herring — he wasn’t shown because he wasn’t that important to the decision making process, and he was just in the back of the room working the camera. The problem is that, as noted above, Forak might be fine when given a script and instructions, but a real actual leader has to make confident command decisions in the field, not just speak lines and gesture with an appearance of confidence in a non-conflict setting. I don’t think there’s any way anyone would trust Forak to do that.

That would be a great reason for him to be using the Revenant’s voice. You get a that bit of Clark Kenting there–no one would expect Forak to be that eloquent and competent, so it wouldn’t cross their minds that it’s him. Throw in that “Zero” can call while Forak was with them, and I don’t think anyone would think about it at all. (Except maybe Ajax, especially if he’s reporting stuff to the Headmaster–though I suspect there will be a conflict of interest storyline soon where he’s not sure how much he should report.)

I also suspect that Zero won’t have to appear all that often. The leader can delegate to a second in command, and only really handle administrative stuff, like assignments and such. Heck, I’d suspect that he wouldn’t have to show up physically very often–now that he’s established he’s real, he could act more like Charlie in Charlie’s Angels.

It’s not like they had trouble figuring out what to do in the field without Zero.

Look how well Zero flies: straight as an arrow, no wobbles. Unless Forak has improved dramatically since this plotline began, I don’t think it could be him. Tyler in a power-suit? Possible, but doubtful: if he could have had that sort of tech, his parents would have given it to him “until his own powers developed”.

I can really see Aaron rolling his eyes at all these confident assertions about Forak and saying: “People, when I say ‘new character’, I mean an actual new character, not someone we’ve seen before in a new costume”.

Not necessarily. If Moon Shadow’s idea included the concept of Zero but not the specific person filling that role in these last couple of pages, then I don’t think we’re dealing with a deus ex machina.

I doubt it’s Forak. He’s too easily cowed, and would never stand up to stage fright like this. The lack of physical contact, though, makes me think Zero is using a holoprojector like the ones some PS238 students use above-ground, so we simply don’t know what Zero looks like yet. Could be a girl inside that disguise, for all we know.

Too tall to be tyler/toby. Very much Forak’s manner, Did I Do Good Boss? His talk of doing the gestures correctly implies heavily that he was -not- the one speaking, which would make sense as they didn’t recognize Forak’s voice. And the only person Tyler would tell is the very person who’s given HIM too much cool to handle: the Revenant. As the speech had everyone thinking it sounded like the Rev, yeah, Forak in the suit, Rev on the mic.

Well, if we’re dealing with a hologram like the ones the kids use at recess, height would be irrelevant. And you could just as easily interpret Zero’s mention of gestures as meaning “I not only remembered my lines, I think I even got all the gestures right!”, implying a very detailed script. Plus, the “Did I Do Good Boss” bit really doesn’t come across as all that Forak-like to me, though I’m not as certain on that one.

The Revenant is definitely the one funding this. Beyond that, we’ve probably got at least thirty plausible scenarios. Aaron is really good at keeping us guessing.